From chaos to order: How to find food?

(scienceinfo.net) - Ant species have a strategic strategy to solve complex problems, this can be widely applied as optimization techniques. A single ant wandered around looking for food in a random way, biologists found this.

However, the collective feeding behavior of ant colonies is not so, as a mathematical study presented in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that: The movement of ants at the most point intention to change from chaos into order. This happens in a surprisingly self-organizing way. Knowledge of ants can help analyze similar phenomena.

'Ants have a nest and so they need something like a strategy to bring the food they find to the nest' , the study's lead author, Lixiang Li, who is closely connected with the whole Information Security Center, State Key Laboratory, State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology at Posts and Communications of Peking University and with the Institute for Research Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research said.

'We think this is a factor, so far underestimated, really determined ant behavior'.

Leave a smell trail

The Chinese-German research team basically gave almost all known information on how to search for ants' food into equations and algorithms and loaded into their computers. They argue, there are three stages in the process of moving in search of complex food of an ant colony: At first, the reconnaissance ants really crawled around in a chaotic way. When exhausted, he returned to the nest to eat and rest. However, when one of the reconnaissance ants finds food in the vicinity around the nest, it will carry a small piece of food to the nest, leaving a scent called pheromones .

Other ants will follow the path marked by that scent to find food and bring some to the nest. However, because there are too few pheromones left on the road, ants are sparse. Therefore, the ants that have been marked along the road continue to release pheromone to mark. This leads to an optimization of the path to food: When the hormones evaporate, the stronger the scent is, the shorter the road - so many ants follow the shortest path. , continue to leave traces of pheromones. This produces an effective self-reinforcing effect - ants are less wasted of time than they continue to search for food in chaos.

More importantly, the researchers found that the experience of individual ants also contributed to their success in finding food - something that was also neglected in previous research. Older ants have a better understanding of the surrounding environment. The search for food by younger ants is a learning process rather than an effective contribution to finding food, according to the study.

A complex, highly efficient network

"While a single ant is certainly not intelligent, the collective behavior of weaver ants can be called intelligent ," co-author of the study Jürgen Kurths, who led the study of Transdisciplinary Concepts and Methods of PIK said, 'The principle of self-organization is known as in the herd of fish, but this is the journey to the nest, which makes the ants very interesting.' While studying the behavior of food-seeking. The ant is certainly of ecological importance, the authors of this study are primarily interested in understanding the basic models of nonlinear phenomena. "Ants form a complex network. The magazine is highly effective , " explains Kurths. " And this is what we see in many natural and social systems. "

Therefore, the mathematical models developed in ant research are applied not only to different types of animals that have the same characteristics that they have a nest to return to, such as large albatrosses. This study also provides a new perspective on human behavior patterns in diverse areas such as the development of network services and intelligent transport systems.